


Gate - 1- Endurance

by sharkcar



Series: The Bad Sleep Well [11]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:00:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25201327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkcar/pseuds/sharkcar
Summary: An imagining of the lives of clones after the Clone Wars. Just some simple men, making their ways in the universe, in all their tragicomic glory.1- Tolerance- Wolffe makes a run right at a brick wall2- Bearing- Cody gets left3- Fortitude- Rex finds his center
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & Obi-Wan Kenobi, CC-2224 | Cody & Wilhuff Tarkin, CC-5576-39 | Gregor & CC-3636 | Wolffe, CT-7567 | Rex & Anakin Skywalker, CT-7567 | Rex & CC-3636 | Wolffe, Obi-Wan Kenobi & CC-3636 | Wolffe
Series: The Bad Sleep Well [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1334464
Comments: 5
Kudos: 10





	1. Tolerance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Commander Wolffe has come a long way from where he started

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away  
  
The Galactic Republic was not, nor ever had been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the human races. They were not nor ever had been in favor of making voters or jurors of military clones, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with natural born people. This was due to the belief that there was a physical difference between the natural and manufactured races, which would forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they could not so live, they remained together during the Empire in the legal position of superior and inferior. 

  


“Bring us something liquid,”  
  
Separatist General Whorm Loathsom, Christophsis, first year of the war.

  


First Year of the War- Aboard The Negotiator

  


“What kind of a name is that for a ship anyway? Malevolence? I don’t think I imagined evil people would advertise so obviously. Who is their intended audience? Or is this what they publicly revere?” Wolffe was talking into his player pod, recording something he meant to look into later, “Is it reverse marketing, to make their cause seem scary, but with a twinge of irony? Speaking of ship names, Ponds got the best ship to serve on, you ask me, ‘The Endurance’. That works in a sexual way. Ooof!”  
  
He literally ran into General Kenobi.  
  
Wolffe recoiled at the impact. He looked up and the vision made him freeze. His hand, holding the recorder trembled. His two eyes got dry but he didn’t dare blink.  
  
Wolffe was still wearing the same cloth uniform he’d been rescued in near Abregado. It looked a little worse for wear. It might have had some vomit still on it from Skywalker’s flying.  
  
“Hello, Commander. How are you feeling?” Kenobi steadied Wolffe, patting his sleeve as if to make a hanging cloth straight. Then he folded his hands behind his back.  
  
Wolffe thought the General looked very dignified in his white gorget with matching arm kits. It looked like he’d started out in a suit of armor and had stripped off some pieces strategically.  
  
Wolffe had lost his armor, since he hadn’t been wearing it when General Plo’s flagship, the Triumphant, blew up. He felt undignified.  
  
“G..general? I’m so sorry, I didn’t look..,” Wolffe’s gaze darted as if trying to find something to hide behind. He found maintaining eye contact difficult. He perpetually felt on guard around the natural born, so he usually cleaved to General Plo when he was around N.B’s and it made him feel secure. But here he was all alone.  
  
“Master Plo Koon said that you were better,” Kenobi seemed to know what he was talking about.  
  
Wolffe wasn’t so sure, “You talk about me?”  
  
Kenobi didn’t seem to think it was strange, “Being trapped in an escape pod when it’s depressurizing can be a nasty business,” Kenobi continued patiently with his own train of thought. Obi-Wan made sure his expression was non-threatening. He even smiled a little.  
  
Wolffe thought the beard made his smile look friendlier.  
  
Wolffe took a breath, “Hello, General, Sir,” and held out his hand, palm up.  
  
Most Jedi bowed in greeting, which made clones uncomfortable. Because they didn’t know if they were expected to respond in kind. In their culture, bowing was a good way to get yourself kneed in the face. Some natural borns didn’t greet them in any way, clones may as well have been room furnishings. Or were often only spoken to in orders and expected to follow with a hearty, ‘yes, sir,’ or ‘right away, sir’.  
  
Kenobi slapped Wolffe’s hand according to standard clone practice. He didn’t hit hard, as that was reserved for when you were laughing about something, to show your enthusiasm. Kenobi’s slap was not soft enough to seem weird. The greeting was in fact exactly the right way a brother would do it. Wolffe wondered if he’d practiced. He thought that’d be cute, but he doubted it happened.  
  
General Kenobi remained standing there, seemingly expectantly.  
  
Wolffe forgot Kenobi had asked him a question, so instead of answering it, he responded in kind. He over-did it. “General, sir, permission to ask a question?...Sir?”  
  
“Of course,” was all he said.  
  
Wolffe didn’t know too many natural born people who gave him this much time to speak. He was flustered about what to say.  
  
“So...your ship here, this is your flagship? ‘The Negotiator’,” Wolffe decided maybe Kenobi could help him with his confusion. “What I mean is…it’s called that.”  
  
“It is. Although, I can’t take credit for the name myself,” Kenobi’s eyes were laughing.  
  
“Oh?” Wolffe’s eyebrows raised, in genuine interest, “But General Plo told me it was named for you...”  
  
Kenobi brought a hand forward and waved the thought away, “I let Anakin name it. At first, I just thought his plan was to make me look egotistical. Now, I believe it’s a reference to my tendency to speak in euphemism.” He crossed arms and stroked his beard, “According to him, I am painfully indirect. I believe it amused him, calling a Star Destroyer class battle cruiser ‘Negotiator’ because it serves to juxtapose the implied diplomacy with the visible aggression,” Kenobi seemed proud. Not of the ship, but when he mentioned his fellow Jedi.  
  
“I didn’t know he was so funny,” Wolffe was impressed.  
  
Kenobi nodded, “He is.”  
  
That made Wolffe happy. Skywalker was already his hero, the guy had just spectacularly saved his life. But Skywalker never took much time to explain himself.  
  
“So General, I know you must be busy, but would you like to have a drink with me?” Wolffe was using one of the scripts General Plo had offered for polite discourse among the natural born. Wolffe had never had to put any effort into making friends before in his life, so it had been a bit of a mystery how to express a desire for friendship without seeming ridiculous. He had never had anyone accept one of his invitations before without him paying them.  
  
“Why, I’d be delighted,” Kenobi responded.  
  
“Well, I’m just staying in the clone officers’ quarters….” Wolffe thrust a thumb in the direction of down the hall, sure a Jedi would not want to come up there.  
  
“Would that be alright with your brothers?” Kenobi asked as if he really was interested.  
  
Which Wolffe was sure was just the dance of small talk. You pretended like you wanted to but then found a valid polite excuse not to.  
  
“Well, they can’t afford to have high standards, since I’m staying there at the moment,” Wolffe joked in self deprecation.  
  
“Then I accept,” Kenobi patted Wolffe on his shoulder.  
  
“Sure, why not?” Wolffe shrugged, suddenly panicking internally. He realized he didn’t have anything worthy of offering. Or anything at all. All of his worldly possessions besides what was on his person had just been vaporized when the Malevolence blew up their fleet. He’d have to beg off of Cody and Rex. He had asked after all, he shouldn’t have done it if he had nothing to give. He decided to just be presumptuous.  
  
They walked, Kenobi keeping himself at the same pace as Wolffe, not letting him drop behind.  
  
Wolffe decided it would look less nervous if he talked, “So, why might somebody name a ship carrying an experimental weapon something like, ‘Malevolence’?”  
  
Kenobi looked relieved that the question was interesting, “Oh, there is a long tradition of naming weapons aggressive things. Biter, beater, foe-hammer, enemy-cleaver, head chopper, slayer, star destroyer. Sympathetically, I suppose, it is intended to consecrate the power of the weapon with a ceremonial wish for success in killing. It was thought that a tough name would give the object a blood-lusting personality. Even hunting weapons are often imbued with powers in this way. A relic of a time when successful killing meant good things for survival. Nothing extraordinary about it, I suppose,” Kenobi gestured with one hand, the other behind his back.  
  
“Huh, so in a way, it’s more honest. I mean, it is a weapon after all. Designed to kill on a mass scale, if that’s not malevolence, I guess I don’t know what is,” Wolffe nodded.  
  
“Scaring enemies is another good reason to name something threateningly. That tradition holds up for things like sports teams,” Obi-Wan usually didn’t get an audience that let him just go on.  
  
“Works for me,” Wolffe nodded, “Does your lightsaber have a name?”  
  
Obi-Wan found it another interesting question, “Not a name, necessarily. It’s more...a kind of Force signature, I suppose. Recognizable to those who know it. All artifacts have those kinds of auras and histories, personalities, properties, some even describe them as having voices. A name is just one aspect of that. Not every sentient species can speak or hear in a way we recognize, but the object is there nonetheless and is interacted with. And names and terms can often add something. Whether it is excitement or irony or just plain explanation, all the name is doing is giving testament to something’s existence. A name is made to describe a thing’s character,” Kenobi explained like it was a lesson.  
  
Wolffe was sure this guy was gonna be amazing to have a drink with.

  


\--

  


Lothal, Twenty two years later

  


Lothal had been under lock down for years. Lots of people had been waiting for their chances to make a run for it now that the blockade was down. The spaceport was a circus. Beings were everywhere and there were vehicles of every kind. All the people were trying to escape the planet, to escape the Empire, to get to somewhere that didn’t scare them so much, or that they thought might treat them better than Lothal had.  
  
Most people at the spaceport were running with just what they could carry or take by conveyance. It was such an odd selection of beings and their things, carried in so many creative rigs, that Wolffe imagined them all as some kind of transhumance of a mismatched tribe.  
  
Wolffe could scarcely believe how far his life had come that he could even be doing what he was doing. Just leaving a world behind him.  
  
Back on Kamino, that had never been an option. All the times he wished with all his heart to go somewhere else. Those times when he felt despair. Or when it seemed like everyone was picking on him. Or he was overwhelmed with the ramifications of the things he’d been taught. He’d feel hopeless and wish he could just fly away from his problems to a world where none of them existed. Like a rapture.  
  
Now his childhood desire was so normal to him that he almost forgotten the pain of the wanting. The fears he used to want to run from were so trivial. The juxtaposition was funny to him.  
  
Wolffe had a guitar, a messenger bag, and a laundry sack. Not more than he could manage on his own feet.  
  
He caught a ride off Lothal, hitching with a cargo ship.  
  
There were contractors on the planet who brought supplies to the Imps. Once the occupation had gone downhill, they wanted no part of a place that was unstable. They were abandoning the world and could expect to be extracted by their corporations back to their home planets. With fat bonuses for their hazard pay. Since they had transport, they were making side money taking anyone they could fit with them.  
  
Wolffe had an easy time finding someone with room. He wasn’t as desperate as some. He had a little bit of money that Rex had given him.  
  
It was probably all Rex had in the universe, just a few thousand Alderaanian he said had been his last pay from the Rebellion.  
  
Rex had not been in a mood to argue when Wolffe had asked to hold the money when they left Seelos. Rex probably didn’t think Wolffe would have anywhere to spend money on Lothal after the mission. At least not anywhere that would get him into too much trouble. It’s not like Lothal had robust supplies of addictive drugs or something.  
  
Wolffe was probably reluctant to admit it to himself, but even then, he was planning on leaving. Or at least making sure the option was there if he lived.  
  
At first, Wolffe thought it was just a little fantasy to get him through. Of course, Wolffe had imagined that he’d just leave Gregor in Rex’s care for a while, take a vacation with Rex’s cash. Let Rex take a turn managing, maybe then he’d appreciate how hard it had been. Wolffe told himself he just needed a little time to sort things out on his own. He could always come back and say it was a prank. But Gregor’s death had just made up his mind. Wolffe walked away with no remorse.  
  
As far as he was concerned, he’d been lying to himself. Rex had never needed him. Knowing that, it was easy to let go.  
  
On the freighter from Lothal, there were no viewports in the cargo bay, so he didn’t even feel the jump to hyperspace or see the atmosphere or stars. Before he even knew where he was, the bay door opened and dropped everyone at the nearest commercial way station.  
  
While the pilots and crews contacted their companies, some people tried to contact their respective planetary governments for assistance. Some called family. A lot of people were chatting up strangers asking for help. Wolffe assumed a lot of them got kidnapped by pirates or were forced to negotiate with organized crime, who might dump them out the air lock at the first sign of Imperial entanglements.  
  
Wolffe found himself untethered for the first time in his existence. He figured he was luckier than most. He didn’t have other people to look after, or mobility issues, or special needs that needed to be met. Wolffe was human, so his shape was passable in most areas. He had a working knowledge of layout of the galaxy, so he could plan. For the first time in his life, he thought his odds were good.  
  
He stowed away onto a fuel transport vessel bound for a refinery in the Core. While on ship, he moved from one maintenance area to another, changing clothes when he could so as to confuse the security cameras. He never did much out of the ordinary, so nobody had any reason to take note of him. It was a big ship. He was no more than a myte on an anooba. He barely came out into enough light to see what was around him. Never mind try to see out a viewport.  
  
He reached Onderon and only ever saw the inside of the hangar bay for the spaceport and the dense jungle around it.  
  
Wolffe went to the ticket window of a discount shuttle line that ran regular transport to Coruscant. Everybody was required to show ID to buy a ticket and get on the ship.  
  
The card he gave them was his best made fake that he’d been saving for a special occasion.  
  
General Plo had given that to him during the war. Plo had had classified clearance, so it was pretty well as good as a real one, it had been made on the same machines. The General had supplied him with the high quality phony credentials and livery classification when he’d asked. Wolffe wanted it so that he could fly private vehicles on Coruscant when he was between missions.  
  
To his delight, it worked. It was an older pass, but it was good enough for Onderon standards.  
  
Onderon was happy anytime anybody wanted to leave their jurisdiction. The general feeling among its citizenry was that Coruscant should stop holding them accountable for protecting ITS borders. Especially if Coruscant expected THEM to pay for the upgrade in technology. The sentiment of the Onderonian populace was not official foreign policy. Publicly, the government hailed the Emperor like anywhere else. But it was de facto policy among the actual ground defenders of Onderon. They simply and quietly harbored the hostility and let people move along.  
  
At Coruscant customs hall, Wolffe piled off the ship with the rest of his fellow space flotsam. He lined up with his things alongside every non-human species and darker human for interrogation.  
  
Welcome back to Coruscant, he thought.  
  
He could just make out the skyline through the viewports in the building. Smog was everywhere, thick as smoke in a burning building. The familiar towers. The vehicles flying in an orderly grid through the sky. The sun off in the distance descending. How many times over the years had he wished to ‘see it again before he died’?  
  
Wolffe produced his identification to the Stormtroopers who promptly confiscated it.  
  
Wolffe hated to lose it. General Plo made sure it was hilarious and topical. With a gentle reminder about being responsible.  
  
“Ben...Drankin, hearse driver?” the Stormtrooper looked at it, “Is that you?”  
  
Wolffe nodded and said nothing more. Troops could be jumpy. They had the blasters.  
  
The id seemed to confuse the Trooper somehow. He looked at the id and back at Wolffe a few times. The picture was obviously out of date, but it was undoubtedly him. The eye was extremely specific.  
  
Wolffe was told to come with them and the others. The troops packed them efficiently in the back of the transport speeder. He struggled to recognize the geography through the grates on the viewports.  
  
After a short trip, they brought their wagon load of people to a detention center. Wolffe realized this was as much as he might ever see of the old world again. He’d tried to get through and didn’t make it. He knew rationally that it was what he should have expected. The next step was either death or deportation. Best case scenario, he was being thrown off of a planet.  
  
As he stepped off the speeder with the other detainees, his footprint was left perfectly on the ground in the dust of the smog. He regarded the impression, then consecrated it with a wish. That his resonance would vibrate and somehow, some way, someone would know he tried. Though he wasn’t sure how. He was probably just imagining his desires were possible. But he hoped anyway. Extraordinary things happened all the time, he’d seen it. 

  


\--  
  
All of the detainees were placed in a common cell made of crisscrossing wire. It was a big coop in a hangar bay. Too many people to climb over to try to piss out the cage, so you just went where you sat. Didn't matter, they didn't give them anything to drink. No room to do anything but stay in place, since there were so many beings in there.  
  
Wolffe was glad he had been inoculated against the major diseases. He had been coughed all over quite a few times by people who had alarming sores. Some looked liable to bite. Wolffe glared at a Shistavanan as a likely candidate. But then he told himself, no, that was prejudiced.  
  
Some people looked half dead, wasting away from dehydration that had progressed too far. A Nautolan in the corner was an alarming shade of gray that might already be dead. Everyone looked grimy and sweaty, even the species that didn’t sweat. It had probably rubbed off from somebody else. Bearing down was the sweet tang of rot.  
  
Wolffe found that, as long as he was among people, it wasn’t so bad. He drank from the situation like a worm on the rain, of all of them being in there, just scared together. It felt like how he’d grown up. He found a certain peace in the common misery.  
  
The waiting was interminable, though. It was making his joints stiff.  
  
Wolffe was glad he still had an imagination to keep him entertained. He did comedy routines in his head and made himself smile remembering the punch lines. He couldn’t remember which ones were his own jokes or somebody else’s.  
  
‘If I can’t remember it, it’s new to me!’ Wolffe laughed at the frequent quote from Gregor. He thought of it so clearly, it was almost as if he heard it.  
  
Wolffe wondered if thinking of Gregor might not be as good as having him there. Gregor and he had been together most of their lives, he reasoned, so any conversations that could have been had between them had probably been had. They’d told the jokes so often they had them numbered.  
  
Wolffe thought deliberately at the Gregor in his memory, ‘Brother, I know you’re in a better place.'  
  
‘How do you know that?’ Gregor asked.  
  
‘It’s a thing of degrees. Anywhere you are is better than here.’  
  
‘I kept trying to tell you…’ the Gregor in his mind responded automatically. As if Wolffe knew Gregor so well, he knew exactly what he would have said.  
  
‘I guess I’m thinking of you because I want to tell you all the things I should have told you,’ Wolffe assumed.  
  
‘I guess you do. For all the good it does,’ Head Gregor responded.  
  
‘If I had died first, would you have remembered me? Probably not after a while, huh?’ Wolffe mused.  
  
‘Everybody forgets everything eventually. Forget how to breathe or how to keep their heart beating, and most people are done for,’ Gregor defended, without answering Wolffe’s specific questions.  
  
‘Unless you get machines to do it for you,’ Wolffe wondered if his eye would keep seeing after he died. He tried to think of what he’d want to tell Gregor. Since this might be the last chance before he lost consciousness.  
  
‘I miss you,’ Wolffe was unimpressed with himself. He thought he had something more profound than that. He wished he could ask Gregor if he missed him too.  
  
Gregor switched gears, ‘I miss pancakes.’  
  
Suddenly, Wolffe did too. Enough to make him want to cry. ‘You had to go and make me think of that, brother? I’m gonna die.’  
  
‘With one hundred percent certainly, yes,’ the Gregor in his head responded.  
  
‘This is it, then,’ Wolffe felt relieved that he might finally be able to feel sorry for himself. Even just a little.  
  
The Gregor voice in his head was dismissive, ‘Who said that?’  
  
Wolffe realized that Head Gregor had just pointed out that he’d jumped to a conclusion. Now who looked mentally deficient?  
  
If Gregor was in his head, there was probably something about it that Wolffe felt bad about.  
  
Head Gregor changed the subject. Which was a very Gregor thing to do, ‘Have you been taking care of my fish, or did you dump him at first opportunity?’  
  
Wolffe decided it wouldn’t hurt Gregor’s feelings to confess, since he wasn’t really there. But it might unburden him, ‘Gregor, that fish was dead for a year before we left Seelos. You were talking to a tub toy.’  
  
‘How did he die?’ Gregor would certainly have asked.  
  
‘That species of fish only has a life cycle of two weeks. That’s why they sell them at the pet stores as feed. You’re supposed to give them to your bigger fish, not keep them,’ Wolffe informed him. Wolffe knew that with certainty. He knew how he knew that. It was attached to a story in his past he wasn’t exactly proud of, but it was important enough to him, nonetheless, that he would never forget it. He had never told anyone about it before, save one.  
  
He wished he had that guy’s help right then. But he didn’t think he knew him well enough to imagine him accurately.  
  
‘Well, then he probably had a good run,’ the Gregor in his head responded, ‘What are you sorry for?’  
  
‘Well...I guess I’m sorry I tricked you,’ Wolffe realized.  
  
‘Oh...okay. Don’t do it again,’ the Gregor voice didn’t seem to care.  
  
‘No I won’t. I can say, with one hundred percent certainty,’ Wolffe thought as an answer.  
  
‘Well, alright then.’  
  
Wolffe hugged his own chest as if that would pull himself together.  
  
–

En Route from Lola Sayu to Coruscant, second year of the war. 

  


The evacuation out of the Citadel prison had been a real thrill of Wolffe’s life. He was standing on the gunship in his full suit of armor, looking as impressive as possible.  
  
The gunship doors shut. Wolffe removed his helmet, blinking his mismatched eyes to adjust to the light change. Wolffe even had an in joke to say to his friend, “Well, General, we did agree, if you ever need a ride home, no questions asked...”  
  
Kenobi had flashed him that perfect grin. He had abandoned all but minimal armor components in his battle dress by then. He was sweaty, his hair mussed, his face smudged with soot, hanging on to the strap on the gunship. Yet, he didn’t look a bit undignified.  
  
“Thank you, you beautiful bastard,” Kenobi joked, attempting his Cody impression.  
  
Cody shook his head in derision. The impression, of course, was terrible.  
  
Wolffe felt swept up by one of his all too frequent mood swing highs, “Drinks later in the clone officers’ quarters, courtesy of the 104th!”  
  
\--  
  
They were making their escape from the system aboard General Plo’s flagship, the Triumphant II. This ship had been named after the old one, which Wolffe had thought sounded like it was trying to be ironic, since the original was blown to smithereens. Hardly a triumphant moment, there. In fact, the name only served to juxtapose the irony of what a loser the old ship was. That made Wolffe feel bad for the old Triumphant, and since he liked losers, he decided that it was only right the new ship be named for the old one as a sign of his deliberate affection. Clone humor was peculiar.  
  
The party turned out to be a real piss up.  
  
Kenobi had arrived fashionably late and was immediately conscripted into unlocking Wolffe’s datapad so Boost and Sinker could see videos on it.  
  
Wolffe rushed over and snatched the datapad from Kenobi’s hands, “Um…..sorry about that.”  
  
He glared at Boost and Sinker.  
  
“These cretins don’t believe in privacy,” was all Wolffe offered in explanation.  
  
Wolffe had locked his device with a puzzle to keep them from looking at the files. They’d turned around and asked Kenobi to do it for them, without explaining why. He was accidentally subjected to Wolffe’s amateur porn.  
  
Kenobi raised his eyebrows, not in surprise, but curiosity. Or maybe concern.  
  
Wolffe felt like he should explain himself. So of course he did the opposite. “General Kenobi, you’re a Jedi, can I ask you an ethics question?”  
  
The general seemed ever so slightly surprised, but in a relieved way, “Of course.”  
  
Apparently Wolffe looked like he needed ethical advice.  
  
Boost and Sinker lost interest and went to refresh their drinks.  
  
Wolffe thought for a moment about how to frame the narrative so that he wouldn’t look guilty, because that’s the way he felt and he needed someone to tell him he wasn’t.  
  
He started tentatively, “I know it’s wrong to lie...but how...much...of the truth do we have to tell? All of it? Or is it okay if we leave some parts out?”  
  
Kenobi looked pleasantly surprised that it sounded like a genuine religious question with which he was qualified to deal.  
  
Boost brought Kenobi a drink, but then went and joined Sinker in mixing up some more ethanol based cocktail.  
  
“Well, it is not necessary to include EVERY detail, perhaps,” Kenobi began, sniffing the drink and estimating the proof to be over 180. The rest was sugar and artificial color.  
  
“Because it would take FOREVER to tell a story then, or to make plans or have a productive conversation or anything if there are too many things to report,” Wolffe tried to sound logical. “Like if I’m trying to tell you something about yesterday, do I gotta make sure you know what everyone was wearing and where everyone was standing, or every detail of what everyone had for lunch beforehand? Or my every thought in deciding where to go to lunch? No, most of that is unnecessary. The story would be too long.” He’d been drinking and he was trying to cover and pretend he wasn’t that drunk.  
  
“I...suppose that’s true. Or, sometimes it’s not the time. If there is an order in which things must be told. It wouldn’t be productive to explain how to read a star chart if you hadn’t yet learned about stars. Or perhaps there is a time of readiness when things should be revealed. For instance, if a magician were to perform a trick, you wouldn’t want him to explain the trick before it was done. It would ruin it for you. But you might enjoy seeing how after you’ve seen it done.”  
  
“Ah, we do that with hazing. Brothers get tricked and then can’t wait to trick the next guy,” Wolffe interrupted.  
  
Kenobi smiled, “Something like that.”  
  
“What about lying to someone you care about?” Wolffe asked.  
  
“I suppose there are reasons...”  
  
“Because I have this issue at the moment,” Wolffe looked like he always had issues, “I’ve kind of got myself into trouble.” Wolffe persisted in keeping Kenobi in place.  
  
“Erm...alright?” Kenobi didn’t glance away.  
  
“So I wanted a pet. I wanted one. I just did. I guess I mentioned it a lot. Anyway, my girl got tired of hearing me ask,” Wolffe explained, “So she said I could have one. It’s really nice of her, you know, to let me, since I have to leave it with her.”  
  
“I suppose getting a pet together is something couples do,” so far, Kenobi didn’t think it was strange.  
  
Wolffe felt encouraged, “So I got this fish,” he pulled up a picture on his datapad of his pet fish and showed him. “I figured I would get something that wouldn’t be too inconvenient for her. I didn’t want it to be anything that would live too long, in case I get croaked, you know, or if she decided to break up with me, I wouldn’t have to worry about where to take it. I read the label on the side of the tanks at the pet store. The fish was just a feed fish, you know, food for other fishes?”  
  
Kenobi nodded.  
  
“It said they stay alive for two weeks. But my girl didn’t know that. And I don’t know why, but I didn’t mention it. So I went off on the next mission for three weeks and come back expecting him to be dead, maybe she’d see I was sad and comfort me. But I came back and he was alive,” Wolffe explained.  
  
“You think it was a miracle?” Kenobi looked incredulous.  
  
“Of course not. The thing certainly died. As I said, I know it only has a two week life. But she didn’t know that. She thought she killed it by accident because she forgets to feed it or whatever, which I’m sure she does. She didn’t want this responsibility, she took it on to make me happy, understand? But….she didn’t want me to know it died or be mad at her or sad, so she went and got me another one. Well, as far as I can tell, we’ve been through like a dozen now, and she still hasn’t confessed to replacing my fish for me. She just pretends nothing happened. Now, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mean to lie, I just wanted to see how long she would carry on with the charade to spare my feelings. It’s been a while. I don’t want to say anything, even though that would be a relief to her to not have to play this little game. But I just can’t bring myself to end it. And I know she’d deny that she did it because she cared. So I’d lose that. I’m being selfish, right? I should put it to rest, probably, right? To spare her the hassle of buying all these fish. But they’re really cheap and...it makes me feel so...good.”  
  
“Erm…” Kenobi did seem to want to understand, “I’m perhaps not any kind of authority on telling people how you feel. But it seems to me...that you are a very lucky man.” 

  


\-- 

  


Coruscant, Twenty one years later. 

  


After a few days in detention, Wolffe started to feel despair.  
  
By the time he had reached his tenth year of life, Wolffe thought he had lost all hope that the cloning program was anything but a big lie. Something the cloners told them by way of an explanation for why their lot in life was one thing and the Kaminoans’ something better.  
  
Wolffe found it easier to imagine that there was no larger plan. For all he had ever seen, every one of his brothers would live and die on Kamino. Wolffe figured it was only a matter of time. He wanted them to get it over with and stop cluttering his life with their tedia.  
  
Then the Jedi came. Someone came to find them and give them the message that there was a plan and a purpose. And it was time. And so, all the myths Wolffe had grown up assuming were lies had suddenly come true before his eyes. Wolffe believed in magic after that.  
  
Then gradually, Wolffe had seen that the Republic had made them to build a defensive wall out of their bodies. He had thought about destroying government property once when he had been traumatized watching a documentary on poultry farming that showed what they did with male chicks who weren’t able to produce eggs. Industrially shredded while awake and alive. It’s not like those beings meant anything to anybody. Even they probably just treated each other like nothing more than competition for food.  
  
He didn’t know why he had assumed that trying to get into Coruscant was anything but suicide. Or maybe he knew. If it was what he expected, he guessed that meant this was what he really wanted. That surprised him, though. He never thought of himself as the suicidal type. He was more of a drag everyone down with his misery kind of guy.  
  
‘Abandon all hope,’ a familiar vibration in Wolffe’s ears made him think. It could have been characterized as a voice, but did not travel on the air as sound. It was a stimulus, a feeling, that brought with it a conditioned reaction.  
  
The stimulus had its own properties. It always felt like it was applying pressure. Therefore, Wolffe had imagined the voice would be talking down to him, because it pushed from above. It was dismissive in tone, delivered with a Core accent, the way Wolffe had always imagined cruel people spoke.  
  
Like an object stubbornly sitting in a room, he knew it wasn’t something he could just will away.  
  
He hadn’t been properly medicated in nearly two decades for his various mental complaints, so to speak. He couldn’t guarantee that he was completely in control of his faculties. He was at least aware enough to do things like worry.  
  
He hadn’t heard this voice in his head since the last time he had an alcoholic relapse. He’d been having a one sided argument with an imaginary Rex and then this voice had intruded and told him to give up.  
  
Ignoring it didn’t work, so consorting with it was all Wolffe had.  
  
“No,” Wolffe whispered what he knew it hated to hear.  
  
‘What hope is there?’ the voice asked him as if it had already dismissed his hopes as childish and uninteresting.  
  
Wolffe didn’t want to answer, but once he thought of what not to think of, it made it all he could think of. He found himself picturing her in his mind’s eye. Her face in front of his. Her eyes seeing him. Her expression of accepting. Admiring. Kindness. Her lips mouthing the phrase he’d waited a lifetime to hear.  
  
Wolffe could practically feel the creeping cold at his back as his thoughts were read. Wolffe felt the voice laughing as if judging him pathetic.  
  
“Go away,” he whispered.  
  
The presence remained, rifling and searching his memories. Wolffe knew it for what it was. It had happened to him before. Force torture.  
  
Painful memories of loss and regret were unearthed and relived.  
  
The strange thing was, all those years isolated on Seelos had given Wolffe more than enough time to relive every memory numerous times over. Long enough for the emotional scabs to heal over. Enough time for him to be used to the scars he had. There was absolutely nothing that made him afraid.  
  
Wolffe lowered his resistance. The presence was not finding anything of interest to it. No Force wielders, no contact with living Jedi, no relevant memories of anyone threatening to a Force wielder.  
  
The more pathetic a person was, he figured, the more modest his delusions of grandeur.  
  
‘Useless,’ it deemed him.  
  
Wolffe found it funny how much being considered useless used to make him feel bad. It used to really hurt. It used to be, being useless threatened his very life. Now it almost made him laugh at being so irrelevant.  
  
Suddenly, the presence fled.  
  
A hangar bay door opened slowly. Two armed Stormtroopers walked into the hangar from the light. Wolffe held up his hand a little as if to help his eyes adjust. He blinked up to find them aiming weapons at him.  
  
One Stormtrooper with a captain’s patch waved the blaster lazily at Wolffe, “Is this him?”  
  
The other Stormtrooper, this one a little thick in the thighs under the armor, leaned his helmeted head back slightly as if he was getting a look.  
  
“Yeah,” he nodded fervently, “He is my father.”  
  
That was the last thing Wolffe had ever expected to hear in all his wretched life.


	2. Bearing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grand Moff Tarkin is having such a rough time of it, he forgets something

–  
Clone Officers’ Quarters, The Negotiator, First year of the war

  


Rex and Cody were playing sabacc for money. Gambling was technically against the rules for clone soldiers. But small stakes gambling amongst themselves was something Jango Fett clones had done near constantly back on Kamino for entertainment. They’d always been provided everything they needed, food, shelter, clothing. Life in the cloning facility had been repetitive. Gambling was at least a little unpredictable, so it was what passed for thrill.  
  
When Wolffe arrived with the General, Cody casually swept up the cards while Rex swept the credits into a pouch to be divided up properly later. No evidence. Clones were used to constant surveillance, so well practiced at slight of hand to cover rule breaking. And, like with most clone skills, constant repetition had made the motions automatic. For all it seemed, they had been sitting around the small table talking. Cody shuffled cards innocently.  
  
However, their contraband liquor was still conspicuously on the table. A huge one handled jug of the cheapest wine available in fueling stations and Coruscant bodegas.  
  
“Hey, brothers, we have any of that plonk left?” Woflfe asked. He picked up the jug to test the weight, “Oh, good, there’s plenty.”  
  
Cody and Rex glanced at each other. The expression passed between them wondered if their brother was deficient.  
  
According to the rules and regulations laid out in the Military Creation Act, the military clones were not supposed to be consuming non-ration substances of any kind.  
  
Cody knit his brow slightly. It was to ask Wolffe a question. ‘Why?’  
  
The fact that they had a half drunk bottle and two cups sitting on the table between them was a violation. A natural born navy officer would have written them up for it if they’d seen it. If Wolffe wanted to get in trouble, it was one thing, but he was now risking them, by complicity at the very minimum.  
  
Yet, Kenobi didn’t look with any kind of judgment. He had his hands folded behind his back and was looking around curiously at the minimal décor.  
  
Cody was the primary occupant of the barrack, so there was an aspect about the place that was personal. His neck grew stiffer looking at Kenobi with a slight suspicion.  
  
Kenobi went and sat down at the table with Wolffe’s brothers. Rex went to the cabinet to get vessels for Wolffe and the General.  
  
Clones usually drank out of their personal kit cups that had come with the utility belts. By dents and scratches in the tin, they could tell which was theirs. Brothers knew each other’s on sight. The only other cups they had in the room were plastic cups that had come with meals at fast food establishments.  
  
Cody glanced at Kenobi awkwardly for a second as he suddenly felt conscious of how low class it all looked. Kenobi had invited him to his flat once. All of the glasses in his cabinet were crystal and they matched.  
  
Kenobi accepted the cup with the cartoon characters on it and Wolffe filled it from the bottle.  
  
Rex seemed the most at ease of anyone, “So General Kenobi, I have always wanted to ask you something.”  
  
“Ask me anything,” Kenobi threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender.  
  
“Can you tell us about when you came to Kamino?” Rex asked. “What did you think?”  
  
Among Kamino clones who had never left Tipoca City in all their first ten years of life, General Obi-Wan Kenobi was a significant figure. He was none other than the person who’d brought them The Message.  
  
The Fett clones knew they’d been made to receive this message, that they were flying off to fight for the Republic against its evil enemy. Their cloners had taught them it would happen, but they were not permitted to know when. The Jedi’s appearance had carried with it a significance that was universe altering on every level for clones. The first step into a larger world.  
  
Most clones had heard of Kenobi’s arrival from brothers’ accounts, but Rex wanted to hear it from his point of view.  
  
Cody remained quiet. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know the story. It was that he was pessimistic about what he thought it would be.  
  
“Well, you clones were very impressive,” Kenobi said, diplomatically. This was not a question he expected.  
  
Wolffe awkwardly rushed to ask, “Our brother Ponds said Jango was on Geonosis. What was he doing there? I tried to tell Ponds it could never have been him, but he insists and if we know one thing, it’s what Jango looks like.”  
  
“No, no, your brother was telling the truth,” Kenobi corrected. He was surprised at their curiosity about these minutiae.  
  
“I thought Jango was in residence at home when you showed up,” Rex squinted.  
  
“He was. I’d just seen him,” Cody contended.  
  
Kenobi nodded, “Oh no, he was. That’s how I arrived on Geonosis, I followed him.” Kenobi thought it sounded as if these men had had discussions of these events among themselves. They were not details that he had tried to keep hidden, necessarily, but that he hadn’t realized why they might be important to set straight, as a witness. They seemed to have a significance he hadn’t considered before.  
  
Wolffe discreetly flipped on his player pod recorder.  
  
Rex thought for a moment, “So lemme get this straight…you tracked Jango and Boba directly from Kamino to Geonosis?”  
  
Kenobi nodded, “And I followed them a bit in the asteroid field, yes. Though, they tried to evade me in rather unsubtle fashion.”  
  
Cody didn’t look up from shuffling the deck, “Sounds like them.” He dealt out a hand of solitaire. He didn’t dare reach for his cup.  
  
Meanwhile, Kenobi filled his cup again. The proof on the stuff was barely strong enough to get him a good buzz. No harder than Mandalorian posca, the sour wine farmers made, with just enough alcohol to kill the germs in the water supply.  
  
Wolffe was keeping apace with Kenobi on drinks, with nowhere near his tolerance, “So you spoke to him? THE Jango Fett? Like face to face? Which one of us did he smell the most like? I got a bet riding on this.” Wolffe continued to make his verbal journey through the stream of his consciousness.  
  
Kenobi tried to be honest, “Uh…I suppose his odor was not memorable enough for me to discern.”  
  
Rex had asked Skywalker about the start of the war already. He had felt reassured when General Skywalker had said how he didn’t judge even the choices Jango made, since the fight for survival hands you difficult decisions. Kill or be killed was a valid way of life in some circumstances.  
  
Not everybody had experienced those though, so Rex wasn’t sure everybody understood it like that, “Why did he run? Why didn't he just tell you who ordered the army? Maybe he could have cooperated if he'd known it was an option. All he did was sell his blood, he might not have been guilty or anything else, but he might have been threatened.”  
  
Kenobi was genuinely sorry to disappoint him, “His story and the Kaminoans’ didn’t match up about who was hiring. They’d said a dead Jedi, he gave me a name that was obviously made up. So I thought his was the more sensible lead to follow. When I tried to detain him, we got into a bit of a row.”  
  
Rex nodded, slightly impressed by that at least, “Jango was able to fend you off? He must have been something.”  
  
Kenobi was bemused, “Not really a fair fight.”  
  
Cody looked at Wolffe and laughed. Wolffe got the joke without a word passing between them.  
  
Kenobi smiled slightly, he knew that clone expression to mean something like ‘get a load of this fool’.  
  
“What I mean is, I wasn’t trying to kill them, like they were me. The Jedi Council wanted to question him about the attempt on Senator Amidala’s life and Sifo Dyas’ disappearance. To get them back with me, I had to get control of them and their ship, my starfighter was too small to hold us all for a trip back to Coruscant. I had to do it without harming the child in any way. Not the easiest proposition, given their attitude.” Kenobi purposely understated the absurdity of the situation, as he always did.  
  
Cody imitated it, “I’m sure they were less than cooperative.” He lost the solitaire hand and swept up the cards. He gave them over to Wolffe.  
  
Wolffe dealt out a children’s game where no money betting was involved.  
  
Kenobi poured another beverage and took up his hand, “A bit less than was convenient for me, yes. I’d never had a child try to shoot me before. It’s quite jarring.”  
  
Cody laughed at Kenobi’s joke. Rex didn’t.  
  
Rex still went on insisting with his point, “So how do you know he knew Count Dooku? Maybe he just happened upon the planet, wrong place wrong time kind of thing.”  
  
General Kenobi felt sorry to be ruining Rex’s belief in the good man who was his father. But he didn’t want him not to know the truth, unfortunately, “When I was captured and imprisoned, Dooku claimed there were no bounty hunters there, but the next day, Jango and your brother were standing on the arena balcony with him to watch my execution.”  
  
Rex sighed, but didn’t seem unready for the burden. Skywalker had already told him that part.  
  
“Sounds pretty bad, circumstantially speaking,” he scratched the back of his neck, “I’m glad Senator Amidala doesn’t hold it against us. So do you think Jango was selling secrets about the cloning project to the Separatists?”  
  
Kenobi nodded, impressed with Rex’s trust, “That has been my suspicion.”  
  
Cody looked at his hand of cards, but directed his comments at Rex, “Told you! He’d sell anyone and anything. He was probably helping the Seppies develop some virus to kill us.”  
  
Not everyone got the father that deserved them, Kenobi knew. But he didn’t want to go that far, it seemed unfair, “I don’t think he’d do that. He was very protective of your brother.”  
  
Cody didn’t understand how the two things were related. 

  


–

Eriadu City, Eriadu, the Tarkin Family Compound, Twenty two years later

  


“So who was he?” one guard asked the other, speaking Eriadan in his thick rural dialect.  
  
“Some off worlder, I think somebody said he’d been arrested for calling himself a ruler,” the second guard told him, speaking the same.  
  
Most of the guards could speak Basic, they worked in the capital city of the planet. But most were first or second generation out of subsistence farming villages in the jungle. They had grown up at home with their parents speaking the speech of the wilderness in over crowded urban apartments.  
  
“They were offering him the standard ‘join us or die’ speech, I guess,” the second guard went on. He’d been in the room when it happened, “And then all of a sudden he started speaking Carrion Spike dialect!” the guard affected an impression, “‘When I break the hell out of here, the first thing I’m gonna do is give it to the mother of my five children good and sloppy, then I’m going fishing’….”  
  
Both stifled laughter.  
  
“I’m sure he’s already been executed. It was something, though,” the second guard nodded.  
  
The story that had spread like wildfire all over the palatial estate before the Lord of the manor even had time to take note of which guards had been standing in the room. Not that he knew one guardsman from the other. Grand Moff Tarkin never spent much time looking his servants in their faces. The guards had gone home from work and told their families over the dinner tables. They talked about it with their neighbors. They spread exponentially like a virus.  
  
Tarkin’s bodyguards had been doing their usual duties as props for a show of force to intimidate anyone brought to Lord Tarkin’s domain. They had never heard anyone talk to their Lord that way. But they had often fantasized about it.  
  
It was such a surprise to those present that it had seemed like a magic trick when that a stranger had started speaking their language.  
  
\--

  


Wilhuff Tarkin paced in his room.  
  
He had had droids drag Cody away, but in that moment of panic, he couldn’t be sure whether he had switched off the comlink or whether it had been Palpatine. The possible ramifications bothered him either way.  
  
Tarkin could understand the Emperor’s course of action tactically. The facility on Scarif would be safer with the Abrion Sector under control. Cody was actually someone they agreed was qualified for the job of Imperial proxy. He had worked for the Empire for years. He knew what kind of power they were offering. Tarkin had no doubt Cody would take it.  
  
Tarkin could not change the fact that he had already boasted to His Excellency about how easy it would be. Offer Cody a smart deal and he would take it because it was best for himself. Surely he was intelligent enough to see that this was everything he’d wanted.  
  
The Commander Cody he knew was ambitious and greedy. He had made a deal with them in the past. This was no different. Why was he resisting? It was not as if people changed.  
  
It did not go the way he thought.  
  
Tarkin could have dismissed it. It didn’t matter that he could believably claim the comlink connection had been severed by accident. It didn’t matter if the Emperor could speak Eriadan or not. That shit golem had made him look foolish.  
  
Join us or die was the script, yet that human bacteria culture had found a way to get to him.  
  
Now, the story had leaked out like gas from a poorly sealed pipe. The Grand Moff had to endure his own daily assumption that his people were laughing at him.  
  
The Grand Moff had to pull himself together before he again laid eyes on his Commander in Chief. He never knew when the communication would come. He could not be perceived to have been phased by some creature created in a laboratory. He had to look like he had everything under control.  
  
Wilhuff tapped furiously at his datapad, filling out the order of termination. Consequences had to be swift.  
  
He was about to sign the order and send it when he was suddenly overtaken.  
  
His throat felt as if smoke or dust had materialized in it, irritating his windpipe. Suddenly, he was seized in a coughing fit that wracked his whole body, he had to run to the refresher. He knew it was going to make him piss or shit himself. At his age, he was familiar enough with the warning signs. He blacked out coughing on the toilet and woke up in a pool of mess, beside the datapad he’d dropped and broken on the marble floor.  
  
\--  
  
Tarkin got cleaned up and changed, but by the time he was once again presentable, his wife Thalassa arrived in her dinner dress to tell him the guests were starting to arrive. He put the datapad out of sight behind a potted plant. Even if the device was broken, he didn’t want his wife ripping out the drive and going through his correspondences. There were many classified military documents, but she found them uninteresting. She would go through them for proof he was carrying on with his mistress, Natasi.  
  
Thalassa shook her head and observed his wet clothes in the hamper and the soiled boots, “Prostate bothering you again?” Her tone was not one of concern, but condescension.  
  
Wilhuff was beyond reacting to her passive aggressions. He didn’t need her, the way he used to. Not even for her money. If she angered him too much, he could have had her detained by police and disappeared. She knew that.  
  
For gratification, he had his mistress trading favors for career advancement. He had all the power there, so Natasi had to cater to him.  
  
His wife felt like an enemy in a simulator, made for out maneuvering, but of no more substance or interest than a hologram. No real threat to him. No thrill.

  


–-

Grand Moff Tarkin was at dinner when his communications droid informed him of a transmission from His Excellency.  
  
It was almost as if the Emperor had waited until he was under duress. Tarkin’s guests were tiresome, trading gossip with Thalassa about inconsequential people. Their son Garoche was drinking heavily and over-eating. Most people who spoke to Wilhuff were trying to convince him to invest in their money-making schemes.  
  
But even in the tedium, he wasn’t happy when the Emperor demanded to speak to him. He didn’t have time to pull himself out of his mood of annoyance to prepare.  
  
While he attempted to slip away discreetly, Thalassa made sure to tell everyone assembled that he’d be on with the Emperor. Her way of getting everyone’s attention. She loved her little social competitions.  
  
His career was not something she had ever been supportive of in any real way, beyond how it made her look. They never spoke about his impressions or ambitions, she never calmed his fears, or helped him rationalize, or told him she believed in him the way Natasi did. With Thalassa it was all show for the pitiful spectacle of elite Eriadan society. Her glory was being the wife to someone powerful. Having people fawn all over her trying to get her to get him to do them favors. It was practically beyond bearing.  
  
The droid led Wilhuff into his darkened den where the Emperor’s hologram was already waiting, towering over him. No time to even make sure his uniform was straight. No time to take a seat so he would be sitting down for it, as his Excellency would be.  
  
The droid left them alone to converse.  
  
Tarkin bowed at the waist. He was not one given to kneeling. Tarkin considered this to be theatrics. People like Vader knelt. Those who acknowledged some higher power that the Emperor possessed besides his secular might. Some spiritual bigness that demanded regard above that of ordinary humans.  
  
The Grand Moff knew that’s why he was better than those sycophants. He knew such customs were relics of the past, when people were stupider and more superstitious.  
  
But this was private. In Tarkin’s mind, he and his old friend were not privately anything less than co-equal. One of them happened to possess more. Their acknowledgment of each other with mutual respect belied their status as old friends and members of the same social class. Palpatine didn’t force Tarkin to grovel, even though they both knew the Emperor was the more successful of the two. Wilhuff knew that it was merely luck that separated them, not some defect of character or ability or deserving. Wilhuff wasn’t fooled. Sheev didn’t pretend he was. Or so Wilhuff thought.  
  
He addressed his Emperor the title of deference deserving of their respective offices. His military discipline required it.  
  
“Your Excellency, I have already ordered a planetary deflector shield to be installed on Scarif. No one will dare come near it and I’m aware of no entity with the firepower to cause a threat. As for Commander Cody, we know where his people are hiding. When the Death Star is ready, his world will be dealt with in its turn. Without their leader they are no more danger to us than a fish cleaning the teeth of a shark.”  
  
They already had assembled a list of worlds to destroy and in what order during the first year of the Death Star’s active service. Rishi was no loss to the Empire. Only Tarkin and the Emperor knew where Cody had been and were perfectly aware he’d been amassing a fleet and private army. The Emperor had made it known he wanted Cody’s organization brought to heel. Tarkin could see how that was advantageous.  
  
He had made it clear they wouldn’t cooperate. Tactically, it made no sense not to wait until the new weapon was ready and take them out in one fell swoop. Cody’s resistance was irrelevant once that laser canon was aimed.  
  
“Has he been interrogated?” Palpatine asked.  
  
This was the first Tarkin had heard mention of anything they needed Cody to tell them. He had already signed the termination order.  
  
“I will know about the elixir,” the ruler of the galaxy used a lower voice.  
  
Tarkin knew what he was referring to, he couldn’t stop himself from wincing visibly.  
  
There was rumor that a secret Kaminoan lab was producing some kind of miracle drug that could restore the physical body and prevent it from breaking down.  
  
His Excellency had become physically decrepit after his assassination attempt by the Jedi all those years ago. Tarkin had always thought his superior must be jealous of him, since he was still so vigorous for his age. Natasi often praised his endurance. Tarkin found it sad that his Excellency was so embarrassingly vain. But not surprising.  
  
“We have not yet been able to confirm its existence, My Lord,” Tarkin tried to be dismissive to make His Emperor lose interest. His Lord bringing up this elixir annoyed him. “I don’t believe he could have told us anything,” Tarkin attempted to sweep it aside.  
  
He had of course, heard the rumors of the miracle cure. But he had never seen any real evidence that such a thing existed. Not even a firsthand anecdote with specific details, never mind an intelligence report with real sources and proof. Everything was ‘I’ve heard’ or ‘people are saying’ or someone had a friend who swore it was true. Or a friend of a friend. Most of these ‘friends’ were made up. It had all the credibility of multi-level marketing.  
  
Tarkin was disappointed at how often His Excellency was driven by esoteric distractions and conspiracy theories. The Emperor hadn’t even taken on enough secular responsibility to name an heir.  
  
Tarkin had always gotten the curious sense that even Sith Lord Darth Vader was more grounded in corporeal reality than the Emperor he served. But that he stoked the Emperor’s prejudices to manipulate him.  
  
Tarkin had always considered it a sign of weakness in old men that they turned to hokey religion when they approached death. It meant even the strongest of specimens could be duped into believing comforting lies if they promised what was desired.  
  
“Do nothing. Leave him to me,” the supreme ruler of the galaxy ordered the Grand Moff.  
  
Tarkin did everything he could to stifle another wince as he wondered just what that meant. Wilhuff had long suspected that his superior’s mind was failing him. At the very least, he sometimes said things that sounded deluded.  
  
Commander Cody was executed, as was protocol. Surely the Emperor knew they couldn’t very well have interrogated an enemy combatant about some fountain of youth. Word might get out about the mental state of the Emperor.  
  
It was best Cody died.  
  
If he was lucky, Sheev would forget or Tarkin could obfuscate to cover or blame an underling for a mistake. Standard Imperial military protocol.  
  
No, it was better that Tarkin signed the termination order and got it over with. He didn’t know what Palpatine was talking about in ‘dealing’ with him. But Tarkin kept his thoughts to himself. So he thought.  
  
\--  
  
Cody didn't know how long he'd been in the cell. Robbing a person of their concept of time was a remarkable way to weaponize confusion. Along with the dulling effect of the dehydration and the starvation.  
  
Tarkin and the Emperor had him in their power. He had assumed they would just kill him. That’s what he would have done. He’d already given them sufficient answer and was rude enough to be sure he couldn’t take it back.  
  
He wondered why they were taking their time. His mind was clear enough for him to do things like wonder.  
  
‘Abandon all hope,’ a voice in his head hissed like a dry wind from an engine exhaust.  
  
Cody fancied he could feel his old master Lord Sideous in the cell with him. He knew it might not be factual reality. Cody wasn’t ever sure if the hallucinations were achieved by holo-com or hypnosis by technology, or drug induced subconscious manifestations controlled by suggestion. Or, as Kenobi claimed when he’d briefed his men on the threat of Force torture, by a dark magical power. But as far as his senses could tell him, it was happening.  
  
He deliberately thought in clear sentences in order to focus, ‘The voices are not real. They cannot hurt me.’  
  
Yet he could not escape the sensation of fear, pulsing from his amygdala in response. Like a dream of falling where you wake up in a panic from the moment that felt like crashing to earth.  
  
‘I’ll tell you what can hurt you,’ Cody fancied he heard. Or the thought had emerged from Cody’s own subconscious. It didn’t matter. His mind was carried off.  
  
Cody found himself in another place. Not quite a dream, partly a memory, lodged in some seldom tread sector of his mind. Some place he kept dark because it was beyond bearing.  
  
He somehow knew it was right after the war.  
  
He was in a cloth uniform, feeling cold from being under dressed. As soon as he’d arrived back on Coruscant from Utapau, Cody had been escorted out of the officers’ barracks in front of everyone. He had slowly walked the gauntlet past his brothers’ questioning eyes. He was put in a covered speeder because His Excellency the Commander in Chief wanted him.  
  
Clones’ armor and weapons had been confiscated as he and his fellow clone officers were arrested and detained for their Senate trials. It had hurt to turn over. It felt shameful.  
  
He walked into the Emperor’s office, his hat under his arm where his helmet should have been.  
  
During the Republic, their private meetings had always begun with the same ritual. Cody entered as politely as a protocol droid in deference to the chain of command. The Commander in Chief would equalize the encounter and indicate the chair in front of his desk. Cody would sit, as protocol allowed. The Supreme Chancellor had always spoken kindly, attempting to convey understanding for what Cody had been going through.  
  
Cody had never really believed for a second that this man had understood him. This over-privileged mediocre specimen of humanity. But he’d had to admit, he had been flattered that somebody so...powerful had recognized the importance of having to pander to him just a little. Cody liked to think he surprised the ruler of the free galaxy with the fact that he wasn’t completely fooled.  
  
Now the Emperor waited for Cody.  
  
Cody swallowed. Closed his eyes. And knelt. He could feel the sweat rise uncomfortably in the stubble on the back of his neck. He looked down to see he’d dropped the stupid hat. He didn’t know whether to pick it up, so he just stared at it until his eyes went out of focus.  
  
The Emperor remained seated. His voice began, vibrating with the same frequency in Cody’s ears of metal scraping on stone, “I trust there will be no surprises.”  
  
“No,” Cody answered flatly. His throat slowly began to constrict. His hands went into fists. The muscles on the back of his neck swelled with strain beyond bearing. He tried to fight back the tears as he coughed for air, “My Lord.” He gasped. Suddenly, his vision warped uncontrollably.  
  
Cody found himself able to stand. His Lord had not indicated the chair, so Cody remained standing.  
  
At least standing still for long periods of time was something he was trained to do. He found his programming was a comfort in times of stress.  
  
Programming had consisted of one thing, since the day he was pulled from the packaging. You will do as you are told.  
  
Cody heard that putrid voice like a moist breath on the back of his neck.  
  
“How do you feel?” His Lord asked.  
  
Cody didn’t even need to answer. But he felt the information slipping out of his mouth anyway, like the shit of a lactose intolerant tooka, “Loyal to you, My Lord.” He hadn’t answered the question. What he felt was wrong.  
  
Cody suddenly felt strung out, coming down after he was forced to take amphetamines for a mission. He had hated those drugs. They were put in him by needles. Involuntarily, as his mind made the association, his flesh began to prickle in revulsion at the thought of them being forced into his skin. His insides recoiled at the invasion.  
  
He fancied a red mist was around him. His Lord was smiling at him. That horrible grotesque smile, like a mask emerging from the darkness. Then it was very close to him. Near enough to smell him. It felt too near. Like an unwanted warmth held against his skin causing him to sweat. His breath was obstructed from drawing, as if a heavy hand covered his mouth.  
  
Cody suddenly felt the impulse to strangle the frail looking creature. He forced himself to fight it.  
  
Cody knew His Lord’s weakness was an act. A magicians’ trick. Cody wouldn’t have survived if he fought back.  
  
His Lord hissed. He seemed to be breathing in Cody’s misery like steam vapor, “You will never destroy me.”  
  
Cody knew it was true. He had been created to serve this man.  
  
Shame washed over him. The sensation ran up the back of his neck as if he’d been licked.  
  
“Yeeees, that’s what you are, mine,” His Lord was pleased. “You WILL give me what I want.”  
  
Cody felt the muscles of his lips go limp as if injected by Novocain.  
  
The mist thickened. Cody’s head ached like his skull was ripped open.  
  
Suddenly he was alone somewhere in the dark. A heavy rain was falling. Lightning raged in the clouds. Out of the gloom, Jango emerged and stood before his son, a chain in his hands.  
  
“Failure,” Jango articulated in his peasant accent. Jango swung the chain and slapped Cody in the midriff. He crumpled to the ground. Jango raised the chain and brought it down on his son’s back. And again. And again.  
  
Battered and bloody, Cody felt he shrank until he was a child again. He reached up a little hand for mercy. Then he screamed, “Father, please!”  
  
Suddenly, the connection was broken. Cody opened his eyes and found himself on the floor of his cell. The lingering feeling of His Lord hung in the air of the room. Full of anger. Almost...shaken.  
  
Cody could not be sure why, but in that last moment, Sideous seemed afraid of something.  
  
–  
  
Wilhuff hadn’t come up to bed after the party, Thalassa Tarkin thought angrily. He hadn’t re-emerged from his den. Probably speaking to his mistress. He and his precious Natasi would analyze the Emperor’s every word choice for meaning. Mostly interpreting everything as a sign of the Emperor’s approval.  
  
Oh well, Thalassa thought, his mistress had time to give his fragile ego that kind of attention. At least she didn’t have to hear it.  
  
Her Emperor had told her in confidence that he didn’t approve of extra marital relations. At least Her Lord knew she was right. She knew she was right, too. But his agreeing with her proved that it wasn’t opinion, but an objective right, the same way one could declare things ‘just wrong’. Everyone did that all the time.  
  
Getting dressed for bed, Thalassa conducted her nightly search for proof of whatever secrets her husband might be hiding. She wasn’t sure what the secrets might be, but the various things she discovered became props in the stories she could imagine for herself. A pill in a pocket. Strange key cards. Slips of paper with receipts in languages she didn’t know.  
  
She nearly missed the device, sitting hidden behind a potted plant. A datapad with a shattered screen. She immediately moved it to the back of her closet. 

  


–

Tarkin ground over the transmission in his mind. “Do nothing. Leave him to me,” His Lord had said. Do nothing.  
  
If the Emperor found out about the execution, Tarkin wasn’t sure he would be pleased. Though he believed in the Imperial administration, he sometimes had his doubts about the ruler’s mental state.  
  
Wilhuff couldn’t sleep at first. He was tired. But just as soon as he had laid himself down, his mind had begun to churn over the stresses. Why had the Emperor said what he said? Would his obsession with the ‘elixir’ go away, or would he become more insistent? He resented sometimes the fact that he had to live in fear of His Lord’s impulses.  
  
Wilhuff wondered if he was at least going to be able to tell people the truth after all was said and done. That even though the Ruler of the Galaxy made a lot of mistakes, that was nothing compared to the things that he might have done that Tarkin had put a stop to. He wondered if anyone would give him credit for that.  
  
Then, he shot out of his bed, as if struck by the lightning of inspiration. His datapad! Of course! He hadn’t sent the order. He could delete it and the Emperor could have time to forget about it.  
  
Wilhuff went over to the potted plant and froze in horror. The datapad was gone.  
  
Thalassa stirred from her place in bed. The tone she used was colored with just a hint of sarcasm, “Wilhuff, what are you doing up?”  
  
“Did the staff come through and clean? I couldn’t find one of my data cylinders,” Wilhuff responded. Two could play at the little feigned innocence fencing match they had going.  
  
“I think they might have. You can check with them in the morning,” Thalassa told him, dismissively.  
  
Wilhuff was suddenly sure she’d taken it. He decided he should be fine, she had no interest in his work. But he really needed to erase that form.  
  
–  
  
Wilhuff sent his guards in to rifle the servants’ quarters. The device was nowhere to be found. He searched his room and his wife’s rooms.  
  
Thalassa had already given the device to a droid, who copied all of the correspondences. Then she returned the datapad to their room, placed in the bathroom in the towel cabinet, as if the staff had put it there to get it out of the way cleaning up.  
  
Tarkin did not apologize for accusing the cleaning and maintenance women of stealing. Or for the violence inflicted on them when he’d sent the guards to brutalize them.  
  
Meanwhile, Thalassa tore through Wilhuff’s correspondences with his dear Natasi.  
  
And his payments to an abortionist.  
  
Thalassa didn’t know that the mistress had not been the recipient of the abortion, but the operation had been performed on the teenage daughter of a friend of theirs that Garoche had been bonking.  
  
Or that Wilhuff was having Thalassa followed by military agents to spy on her.  
  
Over the next few days, their fights kept Wilhuff distracted. If Cody died of natural causes, it wasn’t his fault. Tarkin was grateful his Excellency didn’t send any com requests. 

  


\--  
Tatooine, Nine years after the war

  


Old Ben put the kettle on the stove, “I am surprised by what an idealist you’ve become.”  
  
Cody had once considered idealism childish, “My wife is the idealist, she’s my conscience. I have been persuaded by how well she gets results with her methods.”  
  
Cody had his hands behind his back, tentatively looking around at the hut’s décor. Every object looked as if there was a story behind it. He blushed a little when he realized how like his own home it was. The home he had built on Rishi to begin a completely new life with his bride. They had multiple matching glass sets in their cabinets, many of which had been wedding gifts.  
  
Kenobi transferred the precious water to a small pot and put in the dried herbs to steep. Boiling killed the germs in the water supply.  
  
He waited three minutes exactly, then he poured the tea into two small cups. The ritual was the same as it had been when he lived in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. Here, the cups were mismatched. Kenobi didn’t seem to have the means to obtain fancy dishes anymore.  
  
“You really should read your Ab Delaal, he’s a Jedi philosopher, who writes on morality in government. You might find it aligns with some of your current views more than you would think,” Kenobi was still a teacher.  
  
“He’s good,” Cody admitted. He’d had lots of time to read. “But he only explains how to stay incorruptible. There is nothing about how to atone for what you’ve already done. Experience has made me see how badly things can go wrong when we’re not careful about our choices. Knowing the consequences has made me nearly incorruptible about a lot of things. I have and will continue to try to make up for my failings for the rest of my life. Can I be forgiven?”  
  
He thought it might have made him sound insecure to ask, even in the passive way he’d phrased it. He knew the General was not good at telling people how he felt.  
  
“For that, you need to go to Old Ben Kenobi. I could write volumes on failing with the best of intentions,” Kenobi smiled as he said it.  
  
“Even you, sir? I thought you were perfect,” Cody realized that said more about his own feelings of inadequacy than about Obi-Wan’s relative goodness.  
  
Kenobi took a sip.  
  
“I seem to be getting a lot of second chances in my life. I have to be grateful for that. I really am overjoyed that you’re still alive,” Cody informed him.  
  
They both laughed at the turn of phrase.  
  
“I’m glad that you are, too. And that you’re happy. I must say, I never saw you happy often enough.”  
  
Cody finished his drink and stood, suddenly remembering how late it was. “I should be going. My wife is going to be having a hell of a time just finding everyone somewhere to sleep.”  
  
Over one million of Cody’s brothers were sleeping free that night for the first night of their lives. He needed to be there. He had to get to work.  
  
At the door Cody had enough courage to hug his teacher. They clapped hands one last time. A gesture of peace between them.  
  
Then Kenobi did the most familial thing Cody had ever seen him do. He kissed him on the cheek like a parent would a child. 

  


Eriadu, eleven years later

  


Cody emerged from the vision knowing that his tormentor had been searching for someone and hadn’t gotten the response he expected.  
  
Cody didn’t know if he’d get so lucky next time.  
  
Even that brief connection had left him feeling hungover, dizzy and nauseous, with a headache that was blinding. The withdrawal from the repair serum was compounding the effects of his exhaustion. He only had a few weeks at best before he would start to age again. He figured the dehydration would get him before then.  
  
And Wilhuff would have already ordered his execution.  
  
Cody thought of his children. He thought of his people and his home. He thought of his wife. A longing and a sorrow threatened to overwhelm him. He felt so deeply that he was worried it might implode him. In his exhaustion he surrendered to sleep where he could perhaps escape to a dream.  
  
He fancied he had Lina there with him. He was still there on the cold floor, but she beside him, warm with sleep, nuzzled next to him.  
  
“I miss you,” she whispered, “so much.”  
  
Cody thought missing him would be all she would be able to do in her future. He didn’t care if he cried. He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself. The tears were those of grief. Not over his lost life, his life with her had been wonderful, but the horrible pain of all the never agains. Never again thereafter would he ever stroke her hair. Or be able to hold her. Or kiss her good morning. Or feel overwhelmed with love for his children running into the room.  
  
She responded as she always did when he was emotionally overcome, as if following the same script they’d been through a thousand times.  
  
“So sentimental,” she whispered.  
  
Then, like in a daze, Cody remembered something. The last time he’d heard that word. Cody pulled at the thread of that thought, from out of his mind as he regained consciousness.  
  
Vader. They’d asked him about Vader.  
  
“His Excellency believes that he might be tempted to ally with you for sentimental reasons,” Cody found himself whispering aloud, quoting Tarkin.  
  
“I know who he is,” Cody suddenly thought, clear as day. Nothing remained but the pounding of blood in his ears. He was dead awake.  
  
Then, as soon as the realization hit, pain washed over him. He had no way to tell his people. No way to warn them. No way to send them the news. He was trapped. From neglect or execution, he would soon die.  
  
Nothing to do but wait for different paths to the same place. Despair threatened. It was everything he could do not to will his heart to stop beating.  
  
Deliberately, he opened his eyes. They flitted around the room, darting, taking in details. Concentrating on what he could to distract him from giving up.  
  
His gaze landed on the door. Just inside it, he saw a bottle of weak cheap wine. The kind of vinegary plonk that farmers made at home to have something to drink that was disinfected so they wouldn’t catch parasites.  
  
He lifted the bottle and drank it deeply, feeling like his cells were filling with it.  
  
Then, when he went to set the bottle down he saw something on the bottom. He turned it over and found something stuck to it. He looked through the bottleneck to see it through the glass. There, he made out small letters, made larger by the curve of the bottle’s punt, he read three words.  
  
‘Please help me.’


	3. Fortitude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rex needs help to help himself

First Year of the War- Clone officers’ quarters, The Negotiator.

  


Wolffe leaned in to make sure his recorder received clearly, “Did you actually see Jango die? Are you sure he was dead? Because there are always rumors. Like brothers swear he just put on clone armor and he’s hiding somewhere, pretending to be one of us. We have had cases of brothers claiming they know for a fact which brother is really Jango, they present all this anecdotal evidence, like they’ve seen a brother who looks too old, or one use a fork in a Jango way, or a brother who could twirl a blaster like he used to. But guys who say stuff like that get laughed at mostly.”  
  
Cody shook his head, skeptically, “Any brother starts telling me that, I automatically rank him on the weaker side, mentally speaking.”  
  
Kenobi was resigned, “Well, as much as it pains me to discourage sincere belief in something, I must be honest. I saw Mace behead him and headless people tend not to be alive.”  
  
The three brothers flinched involuntarily. All three were looking directly at Kenobi.  
  
Wolffe broke the tension, “Evidently, General Windu had no further need to question him.”  
  
Kenobi put down a card and took the turn, “I was very sorry when I thought of your brother. No one took him with them. He was left on a strange planet alone. It’s tragic, that can’t have been what your father wanted. That is the risk of working for someone like the Count. They won’t take care of you if things go wrong. I don’t know that Jango realized the risk.”  
  
Cody took his turn and swept the cards. He’d won the hand, “I guarantee you he knew. He worked for plenty of scum. He just didn’t care. Mercenaries gotta get paid.”  
  
Wolffe dealt another hand.  
  
Rex was still questioning, “Why wasn’t what he was getting paid by the Kaminoans enough? It was a lot of money. He and Boba could have lived very comfortably.”  
  
Cody made no kind of face of surprise, “Lots of money’s good, more is better.”  
  
“I wonder if he wasn’t sick of them keeping him there and drawing his blood and putting all those restrictions on his dietary intake. I don’t know if they had ever specified an end date to the cloning project. He might have been looking at five or ten more years of his life in that dinky apartment,” Wolffe put in.  
  
Kenobi felt bad for Rex, “But it also could have been that Jango was hired under false pretenses and got in over his head. Dooku serves the Dark Side, deceit is in his nature. He told me the Senate was being secretly controlled by a Sith. An hour later, he was shooting Force lightning out of his own fingers and waving a red lightsaber. All he did was lie.”  
  
Wolffe checked his hand, “I hate it when people lie to me. I don’t mind the dishonesty half so much as I mind what they think of me. That I’m stupid.” He won the hand.  
  
Cody shook his head at the hand he’d been dealt, “Well…if the helmet fits…”  
  
Wolffe looked at Cody, then handed the cards to Kenobi to deal. Kenobi showed off some of his shuffling tricks.  
  
Rex nodded, “Nice skills, General.”  
  
Kenobi accepted the compliment modestly, “You learn a few things apprenticing under Master Qui-Gon Jinn.”  
  
Wolffe picked up each new card as soon as he received it, “General Plo said he had skills for all his undercover work. He’d masquerade as a retired mercenary, or he would pretend to be a drunken gambler.”  
  
“Yes. Pretend,” Kenobi said, by way of an admission. “The first time I had to fly him home from a casino, I think I was fourteen. He commed me and said he needed a ride, no questions asked.”  
  
Wolffe liked that image, “He was drunk, was he?”  
  
Kenobi shook his head, “No, he was winning too much.” He waved his hand and the cards dealt out themselves. “The Hutt owner saw him on camera and decided he had done it with some kind of device. The security began to surround him, he commed me and told me to meet him with a speeder. He wasn’t dressed as a Jedi, so they walked him through the casino floor and every machine started paying out simultaneously. He made a run for it, with his hands still in binders. He arrived to where he’d told me to idle the speeder I’d just taken from the Temple hangar without permission. He jumped in and I drove off with four Gamorreans chasing us and neither of us had lightsabers on. Flying still makes me nervous because of it. Ecumenopolis traffic is stressful.”  
  
That image made Rex happy, “General Kenobi, I had no idea you had such a sordid past.”

  


–

Lothal, just after the revolution

  


Wolffe had run away in the crowd during the liberation. Rex hadn’t been able to follow in Stormtrooper armor, so he had to go to the Ghost to change.  
  
Hera cleaned up his bloody nose. Rex told her that Wolffe was ‘just mad’ and that he’d be back once he’d had his time.  
  
But night came. Then another day. Then another.  
  
Mart had asked where Wolffe was. Rex had shrugged it off.  
  
There was lots to do. Provisions to distribute, a power grid to get back on, search and rescue for people hit in the bombardment. The dead to line up for identification. Always so many dead. Rex probably had more experience than anyone in organizing relief efforts, so he was busy. It was the kind of thing that he could do on autopilot. Keep working. Use his training.  
  
Then a week went by. Alexsandr offered to help look for Wolffe, assuring Rex he couldn’t have gotten far. Rex said he’d turn up.  
  
Then the days came and went and Rex started to become nauseous at Wolffe’s conspicuous absence ringing in the background of his thoughts like a tinnitis.  
  
Then one night after operating a backhoe all day to dig communal graves, Rex went to bed in Kanan’s old room on the Ghost and found he couldn't get back up again.  
  
It was strange, because he knew he had been keeping adequately hydrated. He was eating his share. Hard labor was something he was used to, he wasn’t out of shape. There was no physical malady he could identify. But something had him locked in place.  
  
People had come and gone, ‘just to check on him,’ they claimed. He hadn’t responded much. Begging off with excuses about not feeling well. Nobody made it much farther than the door portal. Rex turned his back on everybody. Their voices had betrayed concern, but nobody had stayed very long. They didn’t have time to remain while he ignored them.  
  
His mind was tormented. Not by nightmares, he never really seemed to reach sleep. Just that familiar irreality of long term insomnia. He never bothered to turn off the light, so the room always felt awash with it. It made him feel more comfortable somehow. Like back in the old jar.  
  
Every time he closed his eyes, he was haunted by that face. So like his own. He could read every line, every pore, every hair for meaning. The face was a look of judgment. And it had deemed him unworthy.  
  
The weight of that felt capable of holding Rex fast as if he was made of warm tar.  
  
Wolffe had run away from him. Wolffe! His brother, his best friend in the universe, his constant support system for over twenty years, the person whose love he had come to expect. Wolffe had just up and left him.  
  
And to his utter and complete surprise, Rex had never imagined that was possible. It had broken his heart.  
  
The dissolution of a long term partnership was something that was required to be felt, whether Rex had wanted to acknowledge what it was or not.  
  
It entailed the death of a person he himself had been. The hopes he’d held felt like they’d disintegrated. It was the death of a person he could not be again no matter how hard he tried. Only the feelings were left behind like fat floating in acid.  
  
He had had people taken from him. By death or circumstance. Things just thrust upon him by fate. And though he mourned those losses, he realized that he had never had to deal with rejection. At least not by anybody he loved.  
  
So he lay there helplessly. Like dehydrating to death afloat on the sea.  
  
\--  
  
Rex thought someone was there in the room with him.  
  
A new presence. This presence was different. It was insistent on itself. Not just standing at the door portal, jumpy and anticipating. But closer. And still.  
  
Rex opened his eyes and was startled. He knew in his mind, he couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing, so he knew he must have finally lost his mind.  
  
He thought none other than General Kenobi was in the room with him.  
  
The Jedi’s robe engulfed him, hood raised showing only his face. His face and hair were light colored standing out against the dark folds of his hood.  
  
Rex decided it must be a dream, because he had never seen Kenobi like this. It couldn’t be made just of images from his memory. This version was grayer, with more jagged outlines. Like something covered in a coat of dust or a hologram pixilated by bad reception. Yet it was familiar. When Rex squinted, his lines were completely recognizable.  
  
"Why are you here?" Rex found himself asking, sitting up. He wasn't sure if he'd given voice to the words or just thought them. It didn't matter with dreams anyway. Thoughts and words were the same on the stage of the mind. So he wasn’t sure if he was asking the figure the question or asking himself.  
  
Instead of answering, Kenobi instead returned with a question. "Didn't you call me?" Speaking in questions. Rex and Kenobi used to do things like that for fun, to see how long they could keep it going.  
  
Rex didn't know whether it was meant as the truth or a joke. With dreams, anyway, it was hard to tell.  
  
Kenobi's face betrayed nothing to indicate in which way he meant that. His ‘voice’ sounded funny. Like an old man’s.  
  
"Did I?" Rex asked back. He remembered the vision he’d had on the way through the Atravis Sector. He had been ordered to see, and the horrible image appeared, of a dismembered Skywalker and Kenobi speaking of him in the past tense. Afterwards, Rex had been confused enough that he’d been feeling very deeply, sorting out things he didn’t know how to talk about. He supposed he had directed his emotions at Kenobi.  
  
"Wouldn’t you know better than I?" Kenobi's eyes betrayed nothing.  
  
Rex got the sense he was being messed with. That was so Kenobi, though, you'd barely know if you were. He always made people furious with that.  
  
"Why?" Rex could just have been continuing to obfuscate with vague questions. Though the feeling he felt with the word was that he meant something personal. His confusion had stemmed from how could the man he knew rectify with the action he’d seen?  
  
Kenobi reacted to the feeling as well as the ‘words’, "Does everyone owe you an explanation?"  
  
Rex was surprised that he read it as defensive.  
  
"Don't you think it would help?" Rex continued with the game.  
  
"With what?" Kenobi made it look effortless.  
  
Suddenly Rex had had enough, "Forgiving you?" It wasn't technically phrased as a question, but it was definitely intoned as one. He worried it sounded immature coming from him.  
  
“Do you need to?” Kenobi never broke. But the feeling conveyed seemed to be remorseful.  
  
"Shouldn’t I?" Rex meant it kind of rhetorically, because it was a dream. Even in his subconscious world, Rex had always been incredibly self-aware. “Didn’t it mean what I think it means, what I saw?” Rex felt he’d phrased it funny, like his mind was muddled.  
  
“Don’t you know visions can be confusing? Trust your feelings,” Kenobi had stopped speaking in questions finally, but began speaking in riddles.  
  
Rex kind of resented that his feelings were what was messing him up in all of this.  
  
“How can you help me? You’re just a dream,” Rex kind of resented it that it all felt so real. He didn’t need more feelings now, but he was subjected to them by his subconscious. It felt like being trapped in his old bed drawer and he couldn’t get out.  
  
In his vision before, Rex had distinctly heard Gregor’s voice. But he knew Gregor was dead. And in all likelihood, Wolffe was gone forever. Alis had flown off to who knew where and her mother, Lina, his old flame, was just as lost as before. Instead of the people he loved around him like he’d hoped for, he was alone. Nothing had come out anything like he wanted it. It was enough to make him wonder what he was even fighting for?  
  
“What am I supposed to be doing?” Rex asked wearily.  
  
“It depends greatly on who’s doing the supposing, I should think, and what they want done,” Kenobi offered in that funny, grizzled version of his voice. “There are many paths open to you.”  
  
“Not as many as before,” Rex didn’t mean to say it, but he must have felt it.  
  
Rex spoke lower, because he felt ashamed, “I messed everything up with my family. Wolffe’s right, I failed.”  
  
“That doesn’t sound like him. When did he say that?” Kenobi asked.  
  
Rex racked his brain. He supposed Wolffe had thought it, more than said it. Or at least, Rex thought that’s what he meant. It was something in the expression, maybe....  
  
Rex asked himself, “What do I do?”  
  
Kenobi asked, “How do I know?”  
  
Rex asked sarcastically, “What would you do?”  
  
“Be mindful of the future?” the General guessed.  
  
–  
  
Rex found the lights off when he woke up. A sheet was spread over him. He guessed Hera or somebody must have come through.  
  
He sighed, still feeling the fatigue. He got himself up, though he didn’t really want to. He showered and cleaned his clothes, though he didn’t think anyone would care. He walked himself out of the room, down the ramp off of the ship, and directly to their field hospital to find a doctor droid.  
  
The relief he felt from finally asking for help was so intense that he’d cried a little. The droid, thankfully, didn’t give a kriff one way or the other. Lothal didn’t have any doctors with decent empathy programming. Rex actually preferred that. More like Kaminoans. Detached and uninterested in his feelings.  
  
The droid recommended a very low dose of an anti-depressant. There was no way to ensure he’d be able to keep up a steady supply, but it was worth a shot. Actively looking after himself was something so alien to Rex that there were a host of options he hadn’t tried, he supposed.  
  
He came out from behind the curtain to find General Syndulla and Chopper waiting for him. He was worried he was in trouble, he’d been shirking his duties.  
  
But Hera’s face didn’t look angry. Anything but.  
  
“You’re here! I was looking for you,” the general stood up. “Chop told me he’d seen you up and around.” Hera was starting to show her pregnancy under the flight suit.  
  
The doctor droid looked at her, “Your next examination is not required for another thirty standard rotations.”  
  
“I’m fine!” Hera shook her head at the doctor. “No, Rex, you have a visitor.”  
  
–  
  
Hera led him to the corvette landed at the Lothal spaceport. Alderaanian guard were handing out medical supplies from crates labeled with the stamp of the Senate disaster relief agency.  
  
“How are they here?” Rex was perplexed. He didn’t want the Empire back, “Can we expect retribution?”  
  
“That’s just it...She told us the Empire believes the whole planet is a disaster area because the pergill attack wiped out the blockade force and Thrawn’s whole fleet. They pledged relief aid, but don’t want to invest more than a few shiploads of relief supplies. They say they’ll rebuild the infrastructure, but she thinks it will be tied up in committee for years in the Senate just to approve the project and allocate any funds,” Hera explained, “More than enough time for us to regroup and resist them.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Rex put up his palms in a gesture of surrender, “Who is SHE?”  
  
Leia Organa descended the ramp of her ship, dressed all in white, her braids shining like polished wood, her skin glowing, looking like an angel from the moons of Iego.  
  
“My father hadn’t heard from you in a while, we were getting worried,” she utterly surprised him.  
  
“Princess?” Rex’s eyes widened. Then he bowed his head. Then he felt a little choked up. He didn’t know why she always had that effect on him.  
  
–  
  
“Rex, I’d like a word if you have time. It’s about a mission?” Leia made it sound like a question and a command at the same time.  
  
Rex looked at General Syndulla, “Hera, I’ll see you later back at the Ghost...”  
  
“Sure,” Hera looked like she felt for him.  
  
Rex wished she wouldn’t, since what she felt might be pity.  
  
He followed the junior Senator Organa on to the ship to join her at a round holo-viewer.  
  
“I want you for a reconnaissance job for the Rebellion,” the young princess informed him. Much bolder than Rex had been at her age or any age.  
  
“I don’t exactly know what use I might be. I helped recruit Saw for your daddy, and he was a disaster,” Rex cautioned. Rex had heard that Saw had gotten pretty chewed up since the last time he had seen him, by way of droid projected message on Yavin IV. Rex understood some incident had left him closer to an Echo situation than a full on General Grievous in the scale of machine/man ratios.  
  
“My father insists you’re the only man for the job,” the Princess trained her large eyes on him.  
  
Rex couldn’t shake off the sense that she reminded him of someone. Maybe Ahsoka…  
  
The princess pressed a button on the console and a star map appeared. Kamino was labeled clearly, “You’re from the Abrion sector, aren’t you?”  
  
That struck Rex as a weird question. It was just such an ordinary human question to ask, where a person was from. But Rex and his people weren’t ordinary humans. Rex didn’t know anybody remembered where clones had come from. They’d of course been made on Kamino, just past the Rishi Maze, but he and his brothers had never been allowed to know much about the galaxy around them before the war began. It sounded strange to be characterized as someone attached to a region of space. The Kaminoans and later the Republic had always treated his people as excepted from such concepts. They were defined as wanderers. Even Kenobi had been surprised to hear Rex and Cody express their feeling that Kamino was their home once.  
  
Rex thought for a moment. He had been to the region on an inspection mission with Cody. But he didn’t feel like mentioning Cody, given the well-known antagonistic history between Cody and the senior Alderaanian senator.  
  
He just told her what he could, “From what I saw, it was frontier during the war. Poor and remote. Dangerous wildlife. The Republic wanted it to stay open as a spaceway, so they didn’t want the sector developed or populated. There’s still not much out there since transportation to the region is expensive.”  
  
Leia called up a hologram of a logo, “Rumor has it the wealthiest and most powerful entity in the sector these days is something called the ‘Democratic Queendom of Abrion’.”  
  
“Quite the name,” Rex shook his head a little.  
  
“Actual intelligence on the organization is sparse, we weren’t even sure a formal entity existed aside from outlandish holo-net propaganda. They have evidently been hostile to the Imperial military for years, hijacking Imperial ships with weapons and cargo all over the Outer Rim. The navy didn’t admit to the Senate that they were causing real trouble until last year. We asked them if they planned to do anything about it. The military, of course, set up a task force,” the princess rolled her eyes.  
  
Rex stifled a chuckle. Task Force. During the war, clones had a joke that any time the natural born navy formed a task force, it meant, ‘We don’t know what the hell we’re doing.’  
  
“There are a lot of stories, but the official reports have been classified by the military. We senators are not even permitted to know who they’re looking for,” the princess’ face glowed blue in the light of the holo-viewer. “There have been accusations of brutality by the regime, for the most part acknowledged on their holo-net propaganda. Wiping out rival gangs and the like.”  
  
“That’s kid stuff for the Outer Rim. Asaaj Ventress sent Jabba the Hutt a bunch of heads as a present once, and it wasn’t even ow,” Rex was absolutely telling the truth.  
  
The princess smiled shyly. Then, she looked directly at him, “But according to my father’s investigation, certain personnel have been disappearing never to be heard from again.”  
  
Rex still didn’t know why that made him the man for the job.  
  
Princess Leia pressed a button and the identification photos of the missing soldiers and ship crew came up, looking like line after line of decorated paper dolls. The most recent two were working security on Clavius Moon months before.  
  
Rex was completely confused, “Clones? What does this mean?”  
  
The princess looked at him across the glowing console, “We were hoping you might be able to tell us.”  
  
Rex didn’t feel she’d meant it as an accusation, “Well, all of us had mandated military training. This entity is likely employing them, whether freely or by force. Can’t know that for sure unless...we know more.”  
  
“If what we’ve heard is true, this ‘Queendom’ seems to be amassing a private army with a significant fleet of ships. My father would like to know if they are friends or not. We would like you to infiltrate for us and see how they might feel about an alliance,” the princess told him.  
  
She held out a data chip with a briefing for the mission. Her already large eyes widened, questioningly.  
  
Rex felt he had no choice but to accept it. Of course, he knew he did technically, but his heart told him otherwise.  
  
“Alright, give me a chance to read the report and I’ll let you know what I need,” Rex nodded.  
  
He reached out to take the chip and realized he had the droid’s prescription receipt still in his hand. He internally cringed when he looked up to see her staring at it. He panicked that he’d be ruled defective for the mission, since he had a condition.  
  
Instead, she walked over to a cabinet and pulled out an Artoo-unit-sized bottle of the meds from her personal things.  
  
“They’ll last you a few months,” she handed him the bottle.  
  
“Thank you,” he told her honestly, “But won’t you need more?”  
  
“I can get more any time I want,” she brushed it off, “I’m incredibly rich.”  
  
Rex laughed in spite of himself. She had put him so at ease, he didn’t even mind walking back across the hangar to the Ghost carrying that giant pill bottle. In fact, it felt downright cathartic.  
  
–  
  
Keros, After Kadavo, second year of the war

  


Kenobi was drunk. But you could hardly tell. He didn’t change when he was drunk like some people.  
  
Rex had noticed that in his brief time out in the wider galaxy. Drunk people were just the people people were in secret. Some people got dopey. Some got sleepy. Some got happy. Some got loud. Some got horny. Even Rex got sad.  
  
He’d been sad a lot of the time when he wasn’t drunk, so nobody noticed. Because when Rex got sad, he just got quiet. Not quiet in the extroverted way some people did, as a performative misery. Merely external polite quietness coupled with internal panic and self-loathing. Most of Rex’s brothers were quiet like that, at one time or another or all the time. So it didn’t seem like a thing. They relegated themselves to the background as best they could.  
  
But Kenobi didn’t seem to have secrets. One arm holding his drink, the other tucked behind his back. It halfway looked like a dueling stance. Always a wry smile on his face and a certain casual, purposeful swagger as he walked over to where Rex was sitting by himself.  
  
On the mission, Rex and Kenobi had gone through an ordeal together. Enslaved in a mine after they’d been caught trying to free people from just that fate. All around them, their total failure had been apparent. Merciless Zygerrians whipping innocent people, driving them on to be worked to death.  
  
Better trained and less starved, Rex and Kenobi were more able to endure it. They had been forcibly discouraged from assisting others. Even when Kenobi tried, the slave drivers punished other people. So his fellow slaves begged him to stop trying.  
  
Rex had had the sense to defend people discreetly. Like falling as a distraction, or using sleight of hand to pass food rations and the like.  
  
The episode was an alarmingly personal specific version of hell that only the two of them had experienced. Then, as he always did, General Anakin Skyawlker came to save every last one of them. And he himself, THE Captain Rex, got to kill that sadistic monster of a prison warden. It might have been the best single moment of Rex’s life. When he’d told her the story later, Ahsoka had been so impressed with his quip that she had slapped his hand hard, which in clone speak meant something was especially funny. Then she went around telling everyone about it.  
  
They returned the Togruta colonists to their home world and the entire mission had stayed the night there for the celebration.  
  
Kenobi plunked himself down next to Rex on the low stone garden wall where he sat.  
  
“How are you feeling, old boy?” he patted Rex on the back.  
  
“It’s a nice party,” Rex told him honestly. He realized that did not answer the question Kenobi had asked. Nevertheless, he let the comment stand. He didn’t know what to say instead of it.  
  
Kenobi nodded as if Rex had said more. It meant he was reading Rex’s feelings. Rex was used to it. Skywalker and Ahsoka did it all the time.  
  
Rex looked over at Ahsoka, standing with the Wolf Pack.  
  
She affected the posture she used for her Rex impression, “And then he says,” Ahsoka used her Rex voice, “’I am no Jedi!’ and he chucked the spear right into him.”  
  
Wolffe and his batch mates cracked up and they exchanged forceful hand slaps.  
  
“I was glad to have you back there, my friend,” Kenobi told Rex honestly. “When we go through trials, we Jedi are taught that we must prepare to go through things alone. But your bravery really inspired me.”  
  
Rex had no doubt, Kenobi would have come through whether or not he’d been there. But he was glad to have been there. He was the only clone picked for the mission to Zygerria, on an entire team of Jedi. Skywalker had chosen him. He had ended up enduring something so difficult that a Jedi Master had just called it a trial. Rex bowed his head over his drink.  
  
Rex cleared his throat and made a joke, “I was happy whenever they bothered to feed us. The food in there was so much better than military rations.” His innocent dopey humor was a safe space.  
  
By his compassionate expression, Kenobi seemed to react to the feeling as well as the words. He slapped Rex on the back in an impression of his brother Cody, “Was that a joke? Calm down, Rex, some people might think you’re having fun here.”  
  
Rex reacted honestly, “That sounds nothing like him, a teensy bit longer intonation on the vowels.”  
  
"I’ll never get it,” Kenobi shook his head.  
  
Cody was famous for his spot on Kenobi impression and to his chronic frustration, the General could never respond in kind.  
  
General Kenobi shrugged, “I've always been a better teacher than a student. I have a tendency to make my students more like me.”  
  
“It doesn’t work in reverse?” Rex asked.  
  
“All those years with Qui-Gon and I never became more like him. If anything I was more myself in reaction to him," Kenobi was joking with Rex, at his own expense.  
  
Natural born guys didn’t usually do that with clones, Rex had noticed.  
  
"I think Skywalker has that effect on you as well, sir, you’re always more you when he’s around," Rex observed.  
  
"Yes, more with every passing year, my reaction to Anakin is to cling more closely to myself. But if I hold me any closer I’ll be in back of me. Then I might turn into somebody else," he joked.  
  
"Then who will be you?" Rex asked, enjoying the humor.  
  
"You can do it. I believe in you," Kenobi had patted Rex on the shoulder again and wandered off.  
  
–

Lothal, Twenty one years later

  


When he got back to the Ghost, no one else was around. Rex went back to Kanan’s room. He thought it was a good time to get entrenched. He felt he needed to spread out so that nobody tried to snake his space while he was away. That was hard to do, though. He didn’t have much. Two mismatched cups, his beard clipper kit. Some changes of underthings. Most everything he’d had had been blown up with Sato’s flagship and he hadn't had time to replace anything.  
  
Hera said anything she was sentimental about had already been brought to her room. Kanan had started sleeping with her after he lost his sight. That had been months before his death, so anything that was left in the room had the musty feel of abandonment.  
  
Rex decided he ought to clean house.  
  
He scrubbed the walls and floors of grime with disinfectant. He swept up, surprised how much sand had gotten tracked in. Then he took the bed mat out to lie in the sun. He scrubbed the fixtures with a grit cleanser. Then he turned the ventillation fans on high and turned to tackle the drawers.  
  
Inside one, he was surprised to find some broken pieces of what looked like one of the antique data cubes from the old Jedi temple. It was broken, but when Rex held it up to the light, he could just about hear it make the noise of a little static. He shrugged and put it back in the drawer. Even in pieces, it was clearly worth keeping.  
  
After all the cleaning, his room needed to be properly ventilated. Rex went outside and sat on the bed mat, propping one end up at an angle he thought mimicked a deck chair. He put on his helmet and switched on the data chip and read about his mission.  
  
–  
  
The Abrion sector had been mostly agriworlds before the war. Ukian and Galandan colonists accounted for most of the people, humans were more recent arrivals. Most worlds had had indigenous sentients, such as the Rishii birds, but most were extinct or endangered, mainly due to the outside diseases the colonists brought. The sector had been governed from Abrion Major by the colonial occupiers, the Rotsino family.  
  
Seeing a chance to increase their wealth and standing in the galactic power structure, the Rotsinos, under the leadership of family matriarch Esu, had left the Republic and aligned with the Separatists, early on in the secession movement. The planet had promptly been bombarded back to the stone age by Republic forces. The region was left deliberately underdeveloped and impoverished.  
  
Most habitable worlds had primitive subsistence villages and people were left to their own devices. Bandits and prospectors were reportedly occupying some places.  
  
Worlds such as Ukio, Rishi, Hishyim, Varristad, Molavar and Scarif were mapped as being within Imperial territory, but hardly any infrastructure linked the region back to them.  
  
The self titled Democratic Queendom of Abrion was a newer entity. In the last decade, strange stories about them were filtering back to the Core. They claimed responsibility for several raids, were possibly linked to others. They had attracted copycats. Yet there was not a lot of evidence as to what they were. The Holo-net propoganda endorsed total destruction of the Empire and a lot of taunting and anger and blood lust. It got to be so silly as to be distracting.  
  
Rex pored over stories. Some were really funny. Some very clever. They sounded like precisely the types of things Rex and his brothers got up to. Some even seemed to have deliberate references. He figured that whoever this queen had working for her were definitely brothers of his. He couldn’t wait to meet them.  
  
Although just where their base of operations was located, the military claimed they weren’t sure.  
  
The military task force had been led by a person with a familiar name. Kilian. Rex had known his dad the admiral when he served on General Windu’s old flagship, The Endurance.  
  
The younger Kilian had promised publicly to have these outlaws hunted down and murdered by Life Day. Yet, Kilian had been seen recently around Coruscant sporting a demoted rank.  
  
Rex looked at the holo-still they had of him. He recognized the face, the guy looked like his dad. He was out on the town with some Twi’lek hottie. It seemed that the task force had had its funding revoked. Rumor was, his response team lost a whole light cruiser while transporting a Moff.  
  
Rex took a walk down to the shore and watched Oon rise on the horizon while formulating his plan for the mission. He didn’t forget to take his medication.


End file.
